DiMono's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[9/11 Simulator]

It's funny because I have a sense of humour

But man do those buildings make the game hard in the second half. Don't change a thing, just ...wow.

Kevin responds:

That's the only funny part?

[Recordshop Tycoon]

Serious bugs

Love the game, but there's two HUGE problems with it: sometimes the register will just simply stop ringing up sales. Then everyone in line gets upset that it's taking so long, leaves, and your karma goes straight in the garbage. It happens mostly when fast forwarding through the day, I've found. And frequently at the beginning of the day, within the first 15 customers, which means the remaining 50 are all leaving angry, thus the terrible effect on karma. I assume this has to do with when people get tired of waiting?

Speaking of which, it's dumb for the first or second person in line to get angry and leave. I think that before having someone walk away, you should check whether they're within the first couple, and if so then they stay but don't positively affect your karma.

The second problem is occurring for me on day 89: the game is crashing. In Task Manager, plugin-container.exe starts seriously bloating in memory usage (as in over 700MB and climbing), and the game understandably becomes unresponsive.

The upshot of this is that even though I want to make a serious go at getting a high score on day 100, until these issues are resolved it's just infeasible to make the attempt. So for now I'll get that last medal for buying all 4 properties, and then I'll move on to something else and come back to this later.

Xeptic responds:

Thanks for the review. There seems to be an issue with memory usage after a while. I'll have to take a look at that. Restarting your browser seems to solve the problem, but it isn't a really neat solution.

[Apples in the Tree]

I love this game

I like absolutely everything about this game. My only complaint is how difficult it is to get Ozzy's autograph, but it IS a 100pt medal, so it's not like I can complain. My compliments to the musicians, and to your taste for choosing those songs; atmosphere is a huge thing for games like this.

Merol responds:

THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! These guys are AWESOME!!!

[Pixel Purge]

Bugs?

It looks like there's a bug for counting Vessel kills. I've easily destroyed 50 between all my gameplays, but according to the game I've only killed 3. Is there more to it somehow?

Also, even with the skill maxed I don't think I've ever seen a bullet actually pierce an opponent and continue on the other side. So either piercing is broken, which is a bug, or piercing works but the graphics don't demonstrate it, which is a different bug.

That aside, it's a highly addictive game, and you've done very well with it. Keep it up!

EpicShadow responds:

It's rather hard to see piercing visually, but I assure you it's there and fully functional. It's best seen when you have a swarm of the mini grunts come out of a Veseel, then you blow through them all with a piercing bullet.

As for the Vessel kills, I'm 100% positive they work, I've tested it today. You have to actually kill them with bullets, you can't get too close and have them blow up. Them exploding doesn't count as a kill.

Thanks for the review and concerns, glad you enjoyed it!

[Indie Jones]

Only one major problem

The gems at either side, which are the hardest ones to get to, don't appear on the screen until they're already halfway past you. That means you don't have enough time to react, and can lose your streak through no fault of your own. I'd recommend widening the screen so that you can't be surprised by a gem that happens to be out of your reach and you'll never get to it because you don't have time.

Aside from that, it's a great little minigame with simple controls, and I like it. But in my opinion you seriously need to do something about those surprise gems at the edges.

seanjames responds:

Thanks for the input. My strategy tends to be to return to the center after every gem, which can be a bit of a pain. This game definitely should have been in more of a portrait format. But as you can probably guess, this was done on little time and it is what it is. Thanks for playing and thank you for the review!

[English Pub Pool]

My gripes

Really fun game, I keep coming back to it. But it has its problems:

1) I've never in my life seen a pool table with as little friction as the one in this game has. And I've played a lot of pool.

2) The rails don't seem to take any speed off the ball unless you've spun it in the opposite direction to the angle of impact. Rails are designed to absorb momentum, so all balls should come off the rails probably 40% slower than they went in.

3) Where did you get "break" to mean "number of balls potted in a row"? A break is the shot that breaks open the rack (hence the name). Potting several balls in a row is called a run.

4) Since when is there a rule that says you get two turns to the table after your opponent scratches? I've never heard of that rule anywhere, even among pool afficionados. I'm going to go out on a limb here and posit that you misinterpreted a rule about failing to pot a ball on your first shot after your opponent scratches?

5) When placing the cue ball behind the line after a scratch, you should be forced to shoot the cue ball such that it crosses over the line before hitting another ball. Otherwise there's no point in forcing the ball placement. I shouldn't be able to place my cue ball behind the line and tap in a ball to the near corner.

6) You've given the game the most uneducated pool audience ever. A real pool audience isn't counting shots, they're cheering difficult pots. Given the difficulties of giving them subjective judgment on whether a shot was hard, IMO the audience should cheer under these circumstances:

- Potting 2 or more balls at once without being a scratch
- Single-ball shot where the angle is severe
- Any shot where the ball struck is not the ball that is potted (i.e. combos)
- Running the table. i.e. in a straight pool game, you pot a ball on the break, then stay at the table until it's racked again.

7) Finally, is there a way to turn off the messages that pop up? I've played the game enough to know the rules, and there's no good reason for me to have to click 4 more times before beginning my game, or twice after scratching in order for my opponent to take his shot. Tedium is not attractive.

All that aside, this is still easily the best pool game I've ever played online, and I applaud you for making it. I will keep coming back to it when I need to relax, but I sincerely hope you take my criticisms to heart and use them to improve the next iteration of your pool games.

NipponMonkey responds:

DiMono, I'll answer your points one by one - I can tell you're clearly not from the UK, so I'll try to clear some things up for you...

1) I don't think there is a problem with the friction, I've played on tables with less friction than in this game. There are also a lot of programming issues with ball speeds, accurate collisions and desired maximum distance a ball can travel - I think the balance is pretty good.

2) "Rails are designed to absorb momentum"??? Not in England! The cushions are designed to bounce the balls off losing as little energy as possible. If the ball lost 40% of their energy in the UK, people would find a better table as the cushions are dead! In the game, the balls lose about 15-20% of the ball energy when hitting a cushion - I can't remember exactly.

3) "Break" is an English word for the total score without missing a ball. It comes from Snooker: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_
break
"Break" is also used for first shot of the frame.

4) 2-Shots is a very common rule in UK pubs - I'd say played in every pub. We pay by the frame, so the rules are designed to speed up the game, so more frames are played.

You can change this rule in the game:
- Pool Rules->Set 8-Ball Rules

Common English 8-Ball Rules, see rule 6A: http://www.epa.org.uk/oldeparules.php
The official English 8-Ball rules have recently switched to World 8-Ball Rules, but most people play the traditional English rules.

5) Hitting down the table is a rule from Straight Pool only, in 8-Ball you don't play that rule - it's an old rule that has no purpose in 8-ball these days. I didn't add the rule to the Straight Pool mode as I didn't think it was worth the effort of adding this check. Mainly because I don't see the point of it and find it the most frustrating rule ever!

6) Yeah, the clapping isn't great, that's quite a lot of extra code to judge the difficulty of a shot you made, and to judge if you meant to do it or not! I might try to make the clapping better if I make another one...

7) You can't turn off the messages completely. As you play a few of them stop being shown. I just click quickly, it never really bothered me, I might improve this if I get time...

I hope that clears up some of your gripes.

"All that aside, this is still easily the best pool game I've ever played online"

Thanks :-)

[Blazing Hoops]

Mediocre

Here are the things you need to do to make this a good game:

1) 25pt medals should be easily repeatable. You have a 25pt medal that first requires you to get a 100pt medal that's based largely on luck (if your shots are from too far out, it doesn't matter how good you are, they'll take too long to get to the hoop and you'll run out of time). Either reduce the point requirement, or make it also a 100pt medal.

2) Text buttons need hit areas. Otherwise you need to be within the text for the button to work.

3) The game laaaaaaaags after a few plays such that you need to reload the page to play again. Fix that.

4) If you restart while the ball's on fire, it takes twice as many baskets to get on fire again. Fix that.

5) Part of the hoop goes behind the ball when it should go in front of it. Need to fix that.

6) It looks like if you alley hoop (it's alley-oop, incidentally) the shot that gets you on fire, it doesn't put you on fire for some reason.

And that's what I've got for you. The game does show promise, and I have no doubt that your next games will be better as you progress, but these are some of the things you need to fix here and watch for in your future endeavours.

Cheers

Sajyd responds:

Wow thank you Cheers. You show me some bugs that I had not even noticed. Regarding the medals, I wanted to change, but I needed another approval. For the first, I expected I do not know how long, so I preferred to abstain. Unfortunately the game is widely circulated on the internet, but I promise that my next game wich I'm working on actually will be debugged and probably much more exciting. Thanks again and for the Alley Hoop, it's because I'm french :/

[Super Switcher]

Two things wrong

First, a minor one, the laser isn't actually on the tutorial level. So the arrow seems to just be pointing at empty space.

Second, pausing MUST be a single-click exercise. Having to click twice to pause, especially when the first gate is sometimes very high up, is laborious and makes pausing a very dangerous prospect.

Also, the tutorial and the instructions have different information, specifically about the balls. The pink is either +500 or +1000 depending where you look, and the brown -score ball isn't mentioned in the tutorial.

So yeah, fix those and you'll have a great game.

Zoete responds:

I knew of that pause bug, it has now been fixed. I will fix the wrong information too. Thanks for your review.

[Code Breaker Math]

Your answer for Array is wrong

"or" should be "of"

Anyway, my biggest beef is that I can keep getting the same few words over and over without getting to new ones. I got array seven times before getting nonagon once. Add something so that you can't get the same word twice until you've gotten each word once.

mathnook responds:

I will definitely check that out. It is random but I've seen Flash's random function often not behave very randomly. Thanks for the heads up.

Edit: I've uploaded a new version with the "or" changed to "of" and am going to fire my proofreader. Just kidding as she is actually family. The random fix will take a bit longer. Thanks again.

Edit 2: Random issue fixed with no repeats.

[Touch The Bubbles 3]

Good, but people are cheating

Right now the high score is over 6 million. That means that player must have averaged over 300,000pts per level. I think you may want to figure out what the theoretical maximum score on each level is, and get the scores that are blatantly fake removed.

Everything else about the game is fantastic though. I love it.

GameBalance responds:

I know how this happend really. I'll tell Komix.